Sheets are often manipulated by means of cassettes, in which cassettes one or several sheets are held in the horizontal position and on top of each other. By means of the cassettes, the sheets are held in a storage, which is, for example, a high rise storage or a shelf system, in which the cassettes are placed. A cassette is presented in publication EP 1582481 A1. The cassettes are fed into the storage and delivered from the storage by using a separate station, by means of which the sheets can be delivered to the cassette or removed from the cassette, for example by means of the fork of a forklift. The station comprises a kind of a table which is fixed to be stationary or, in the normal case, is movable by means of rails back and forth into and out of the storage. The storage is also provided with the necessary lifting and transfer devices, by means of which the cassette can be transferred to a desired location, or onto the table.
A rectangular station of prior art comprises bars which, when lifted up, elevate the sheets up from the cassette. In a corresponding manner, the sheets can be lowered onto the bars, for example by means of the fork of a forklift, and when lowered down, the bars lower the sheets into the cassette. For this purpose, the bottom of the cassette is provided with openings, through which the bars can ascend higher than the cassette and descend lower than the cassette. The bars are pivoted around a horizontal pivot axis from a horizontal position to a vertical position.
In the above-mentioned examples, the pivot axis of the bars is transverse to the longitudinal direction of the station. The station comprises several pivotable beams, to which the bars are fastened and which are parallel to said pivot axis. The bars which pivot in opposite directions are placed horizontally in an interlaced fashion.
In a station of prior art, the bars are continuously vertical, and a horizontal supporting beam can be placed temporarily at the end of two or more bars. The supporting beams are capable of supporting sheets and sheet materials as well as pallets, for example as many as five euro pallets, which are lowered into the cassette. The cassette is provided with openings, through which the bars and the supporting beams extend.
One problem is that the vertically moving bars require a lot of space in the height direction, in which case the station becomes unnecessarily high, wherein the use of a forklift and the fork of the forklift may be problematic, and the apparatus requires a lot of space in the height direction. The bars can be converted to be pivotable, but the elongated horizontal supporting beam cannot be fixed to the bars in a stationary manner, because the bars are interlaced, as already mentioned above. Furthermore, there is a risk that when pivoting in the lateral direction, said bars collide with the fork which is parallel to the width direction of the station.